Guild Wars 2

My biggest issue with the ele ATM is the long windups on their attacks. The starting animations are long, the attacks themselves have delayed effects, and it makes playing the ele quite difficult. You essentially have to play the class 4 seconds into the future.

If the activation times and animation times for ele skills were tweaked to be a bit faster, the class would be much stronger.

I think the OP might have a bit of a misunderstanding: all professions in this game do damage. Not only that, but all professions in this game do a lot of damage. You can outfit anyone in pure berserker gear, and when you do this you can get some freakishly high DPS. So, my suggestion is to pick a class that is flashy, and just build for DPS. But, if you want the classes laid out, then (listed by my opinion):

Elementalist: These guys are kings at AoE damage and combo fields, and are IMO the highest DPS class overall. They come with a lot of potent ranged attacks, and also great utility as well. Due to the FGS running bug(?), you can stack up insane amounts of damage against cornered foes. But… your defenses are paper thin, and to maximize damage you’ll have to utilize combo fields to get the most out of your buffs.

Thief: Highest single target damage in the game. Decent AoE damage with the shortbow and sword as well. Most utilities are defensive, but signet builds can increase damage a lot, since thief weapons already have a lot of utility. Haste makes for nice burst damage, and they are already at stacking fury.

Guardian: high base damage, a ton of combos, reflects to reflect back damage a ton of cleave, comes with a lot of additional low maintenance support, great at stacking might, comes with a lot of active blocks. They are bland, but effective.

Engineer: Best self buffer in the game, capable of sustaining 20+ stacks of might constantly, along with decent fury uptime as well. Bombs and grenades both do a lot of direct and condi damage in large AoEs. To top it off, with the nigh limitless utility an engi provides, there is no problem you won’t have a solution for. But, the engi is a high maintenance class to play, with a high skill floor and skill ceiling. Comes with haste.

Necromancer: direct damage necos are highly underrated. From the ability to plow through armies with life blast, to the relentless single target damage of dagger flashing, with decent self buffing abilities the necro arguably the ultimate of low maintenance DPS. Their high HP and constant LF gain makes the necro quite tanky even without dodging, but their flaw is their lack of serious AoE damage.

Mesmer: Mesmer phantasms are extremely potent, doling out a ton of AoE damage at range, and alongside of their reflect skills the mesmer becomes a tricky pony to play and fight with. But, mesmer phantasms take a long time to build up damage, so often opponents will be dead before you can fully get going. But nonetheless you have a lot of support prowess on the side. Also comes with time warp, which is a group AoE haste.

Ranger: don’t have much experience with this, so I can’t speak personally. I think the have high sustained single target damage, though.

I’m not sure a hide anything option would be hard to implement. We already know that it looks like to not wear a piece of armor. You can just take it off and see what it looks like. The toggles just change whether or not the armor is visible.

Individualized loot was one of the features that piqued my interest in GW2. I’ve played MMOs before where literally every other player is your enemy because they steal kills, steal loot, steal resources, and fight you every step of the way.

I would like to take this moment to talk about the death of City of Heroes. CoH was my favorite MMO ever, so much that I actually shed a tear upon learning that my favorite game was being killed. Now, you may wonder why it is this game was killed. Wait… you aren’t wondering? Pay attention anyway, since I’m making a point.

There was an infamous update that changed how the game worked forever. That update was called “Issue 6”, and among its updates was a radical change and re-balancing to PVP. In particular, every single skill in PVP was changed so that the entirety of the game’s mechanics were different from PVE. How damage was handled, how buffs/debuffs were handled, how control was handled, how heals were handled, how builds were handled, all of it was rewritten from the ground up.

This ostracized the PVP players because now everything they learned and love was ousted. This also prevented new players from getting into the PVP game, since now everything they worked for didn’t work, and they had to learn a new game from scratch.

Near its end, City of Heros had no PVP scene. Literally. You could wander into PVP maps, and be the only person there. Without the competitive playerbase, players for the game tended to play in waves: they would play the new PVE content, leave for an extended period of time until there was a lot of new content to play with. This was a subscription based game, btw, so these periods of absence would mean less profit.

This is a very big problem with the whole “separate PVP and PVE” issue. People like to seamlessly transition from one mode to another, understanding that their auto attack will do the same damage across game types. But if you rewrite everything from either game mode, you ostracize nearly the entirety of players in that game mode.

There is a different solution that I’d like to throw on the table: instead of separating PVE and PVP, just bring them together more. Make PVE more like PVP, and this problem starts to resolve itself.

I for one am glad about the change. In WvW, the hardest part about rallying behind a commander was that I had to simultaneously watch the mini-map and the rest of the screen. Now, I can just watch the screen and be alert to my surroundings.

EDIT: Word confusion kills me….

Anet decided to just have people put suggestions into their relevant forums for that suggestion.

Wasn’t a bad idea, since the suggestion forum was kind of dead to begin with.

Shinzan.2908:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Elephant in the room: the heavily implied lesbian innuendo. The fact is that not everyone likes, agrees with, or is comfortable with homosexuality. It could be that they find the physical act to be disconcerting. It could be that they don’t agree with notion of contemporary homosexuality as a whole.

Such people and opinions are best ignored.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

It could be something less, like how many don’t like how the fanservice angle is patronizing men, or how their sexuality is being used to crutch an otherwise uninteresting story, thus exploiting the entire demographic.

This complaint I can accept. However that’s just video games for you, you could say the same about the design of female armor being eyecandy in general. Yet people point out this particular instance when it’s on par with the rest of GW2’s design and writing, which makes me think that a lot of them are actually complaining for the first set of reasons yet trying to hide their own issues by claiming it’s for the last one. Or do you think the OP was complaining about Logan and Jennah or other instances of NPC’s shown as being in a relationship until now?

Strange. I thought my opinion was best ignored… it’s something I’ve come to call the Seth Macfarlane syndrome. It is when some form of public entertainment becomes a vehicle for the author(s) political ideologies and agenda. Suddenly that serial comedy or drama you were watching has become a thinly veiled metaphor about the international trade policies of Ireland or something like that, and it just painful to watch. The people who don’t agree get offended, many of the people who do agree find it painful to watch anyway, and all because the author has taken the position that they should just “forget” those that disagree with them.

Anyway, I’m certain there are those who don’t support the lesbian angle because they aren’t comfortable with it will make tangential complaints about the Kas/Jory relationship, but there is definitely not “a lot” of this, judging by the content of the rest of this thread. I give my fellow man a bit more depth than that, and take most things said at face value. You have to consider the reverse of the situation as well: while you can say that people hate the story because of homosexual overtones, you can also say that people only like the story because of homosexual overtones. Widespread dismissal is a two-way street. If anything, those that don’t support Kas/Jory would just stay silent about the issue.

As for the silence, I do fear that it is because of a second “elephant” in the room: the devs. By putting this into the story, the developers, AKA the people who moderate this website and have power over your account, have made their position clear. To publicly defy this position can have serious repercussions to the game. I’ve seen it happen at least a half dozen times: there will be a public forum with a thread to specifically discuss an issue, but anyone who disagrees with moderators gets their posts deleted and are banned. Tolerance is a two way street, too: you have to accept that people disagree with you, and that those who disagree with you are people.

The devs themselves are the ones who introduced this topic when they put it into the game. As to whether the devs have the maturity to allow discussion of the topic they introduced, that remains to be seen.

@OP: Your first suggestion sounds really familiar. Mostly because it is essentially the trait system: you have a certain amount of points to spend, and as you spend those points you gain access to more and different abilities the more you invest in a single trait. But, those trait lines aren’t necessarily DPS related.

As for extending trait abilities to the actual gear involved… I’m not so sure. I do know that the idea of statistical benchmark requirements is something used a lot in different games, but I’m not sure it is right for GW2. Gear itself is difficult to swap out, and can become expensive as you try more and more builds.

It was always my understanding with GW2’s build system that different stat loadouts weren’t meant to make roles, but to allow for preferences. Choosing between similar gear (solider, knight, valkyrie, assassin, berserker) was all meant to accomplish a main goal: how you like to play the class. You’ll have access to the same utilities and weapons, and so the gear choice is there to reinforce how you’d like to fulfill that same “role”. The traits themselves have a relatively minor impact on build stats themselves, and with a free-form selection of utilities and weapons, the flexibility of the build system is its strength.

Benchmarks reduce that flexibility to a large degree. Also, currently without additional benchmarks, most classes can run pure DPS fairly easily already. Adding further support or further control through alternate stat investment won’t be well received, because there simply isn’t a demand for more support or control as a whole. You’d need to have a demand for such additions before adding them.

@Kortam: A good rule of thumb to go by is this: punishment causes aversion.

When the punishments for failing events are severe and limiting, this doesn’t cause people to complete the event. It causes people to shy away from that area, instead gathering in one spot where all the events are already completed en mass. The end result being that these events are abandoned completely, and exist only to ambush newbies who wander into an area.

This is called negative reinforcement: instead of rewarding a player for doing something, you are punishing a player for not doing something. In general this isn’t healthy for one’s psyche, and years of aversion therapy testing can attest to that. It is the most sadistic way of getting a player to play the game. I’ve played games that did this, and I can happily say that I will never go back to them. Heck, I once played an MMO that would automatically disband your clan if you didn’t get enough people to log in regularly and grind materials for the base…

I support the option to hide any piece of armor.

I myself am not one for the boots. But the shirt… that is the one I want. The main reason? I want my male characters to hulk out from time to time. Maybe it is because I grew up with He-man, but I like the combination of Rambo + Braveheart.

Granted, it does look silly on female toons, though.

I agree with everything in the OP.

Something I always thought about was how short duration the confusion from the mesmer is. Cry of Frustration and Confusing Combatants, for example, only cause confusion for 3 seconds. In 3 seconds duration, an opponent will get off maybe two attacks, but in the randomness of a fight not even that is guaranteed.

This would normally be counterbalanced by the inaction of the opponent. If the opponent is inactive due to confusion if it somehow stacked really high, then this gives the player time to do additional damage against an inactive opponent. However, in practice this is flawed in three ways:

#1: The confusion is such a short duration that the “inactive window” is way too short to accomplish anything.
#2: Confusion is difficult to stack and maintain, making relevant stacks hard to accomplish.
#3: A condi mesmer doesn’t have alternative methods of inflicting much damage, leaving the already short inactive window nigh useless.

I haven’t suggested anything because this might be a temporary problem. The runes are under revision, and if Perplexity’s confusion duration gets fixed, then condi mesmers might finally have that duration increase they need… for WvW.

But if the runes aren’t fixed, then I would suggest increasing the basic duration for confusion from 3 seconds to 4 seconds for Illusionary Retribution, Cry of Frustration, and Confusing Combatants, and from 4 seconds to 5 seconds for Blinding Befuddlement and Confusing Enchantments.

O.K. We’ll try this “respectfully” this time.

The most important thing when writing a story is to make things interesting. For a videogame, this usually involves gameplay. When playing a traditional RPG, we care about the relationships of the characters for several reasons:

A)We are often guiding or choosing the relationships and how they play out.
B)The relationship is often a product of the gameplay itself, and not the other way around.

This is why the Rox and Braham story is interesting. We met them though our gameplay and fought next to them. Then, they met up, and we went through what was IMO the best dungeon the game had. The interaction those two had was interesting, because the whole time we were bashing in dredge heads and yanking off charr tails. Their friendship was fun, literally. We had fun because we were playing a game. Granted, lately their story is has become more bland as time has gone on, but a strong beginning goes a long way.

But Marjory and Kasmeer… We met Marjory in a cutscene, and then… didn’t do much with her. Kasmeer was there too, I think, but the first time I ever noticed her was at the Southsun Event. I think many people will agree with me on why that is the first time we noticed: http://dulfy.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/gw2-southsun-mini-kasmeer.jpg

Yeah… not a strong character there. We learned about these two from cutscenes and text. It wasn’t until the end of the Tower of Nightmares before we actually fought alongside of them, and by that time I had already checked out of the living story for being lackluster overall. Kas/Jory falls into the same fault with much of the living story as of late: I wasn’t given enough of a reason to care at the beginning.

Elephant in the room: the heavily implied lesbian innuendo. The fact is that not everyone likes, agrees with, or is comfortable with homosexuality. It could be that they find the physical act to be disconcerting. It could be that they don’t agree with notion of contemporary homosexuality as a whole. It could be something less, like how many don’t like how the fanservice angle is patronizing men, or how their sexuality is being used to crutch an otherwise uninteresting story, thus exploiting the entire demographic.

I am one of them. The lesbian innuendo makes the relationship more than just stale. It makes the relationship unsettling, which drives players away from the game faster than something that is simply uninteresting.

Something I noticed with stun breakers is that they don’t work. The reason why they don’t work is largely due to the amount of consecutive stun in the game. Classes run a lot of CC, and in group environments it isn’t uncommon to have multiple stuns layered on a player over and over again.

But… I would make it so stun breaks give at least short duration stability, regardless of whether or not they are used under an actual stun. This gives players the ability to actively counter CC, instead of just reacting to being hit by it.

I could’ve sworn the new boat is that mesmers are underpowered…

Honestly, I just think the game needs more access to stability.

My suggestion for confusion is to give enemies more rapid attacks, which can let confusion tick more often.

phys.7689:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Josh Foreman.8250:

The other question that I hope is answered in the positive is this: Can the average player skill be raised by challenging content like this? We know that X% of players don’t know about traits. We know Y% never swap out their 7-0 skills to accommodate specific challenges. And there are probably dozens of other systems that go unused by some portion of the player-base. If even 10% of that group hits a challenge like the Marionette and the subsequent tension causes them to look into these systems and they learn a new depth to the game they otherwise never would have, I think that’s a win for everybody. The average skill level rises, and in turn, we devs can make more interesting events that utilize the depth of the systems we have.

I’ve worked as an educator myself, and I can say that this simply doesn’t work. The situation described here is the exception, not the rule. It is unfortunate that I see this method teaching in college all the time, and had been subject to this method myself growing up. I don’t know if there is any direct term for this, but I’ve come to call it Educational Darwinism.

Educational Darwinism is the brilliant idea of not teaching people directly, but simply punishing them for not already knowing what you want them to know.

I hate this method, mostly because it doesn’t teach. Sure, the average grades or the average skill level will go up, but not because people are learning. It is because the people who don’t know get expelled/drop out/quit playing, and thus only the people who already know keep playing. I see it used in college and highschool, since there the growth or achievement of any individual student isn’t of concern.

If people not utilizing game mechanics is a problem, then requiring them to know game mechanics isn’t a solution. Think about it:

*The game isn’t new. If someone wanted to look up builds, traits, dodging, combo fields, etc. they would have already done it.
*There is no indication that they should learn something new. This leads to players just getting frustrated and quitting.
*There is no indication what they should learn. If they come to the conclusion that they are lacking knowledge with no one telling them somehow, they don’t know where to look. This leads to wrong ideas, frustration, and quitting.
*The whole thing feels like punishment, and so the more sensitive or defiant players will quit out of principle against an unfair system.

There are so many ways it can fail, and only one way it can succeed. Alienating the playerbase has more negative side effects than you’d think, especially in an event that requires hundreds of people.

I think you are looking at anet wrong here, they arent exactly the educator, they are the world. Their job is to create a wide world, where people can interact. People havent learned these skills, not because the game didnt teach it, but because you almost never have to use these skill/knowledge to succeed.

Its like how people lose their math skills, not because they never learned it, but because for years, they never had to use any of it. Even if you got an A in math most people wont remember how to analyze a quadratic equation.

However, if the world starts using quadratic equations in everything, all of a sudden 90% of people learn how to deal with its uses, and some will gain/remember a deeper understanding.

Anet has to put more content that encourages coordination in order for people to actually use it, most people simply wont learn or use new things if there is no benefit Once Anet designs in that benefit, people can begin to remember their lessons, use new tools, and teach others.

I mean what is anet really going to teach people that they havent been exposed to here? observe the enemy? follow the instructions in map chat? kill monsters? Everything you need to win these fights is nothing new, Its just that about 20% of people never really have to observe, or listen to people, heck some people do large group events with mapchat off.

A person can only be reminded of something they already know in the first place. Anet isn’t doing this: they say they want to take people who don’t know, and punish them for not knowing under the idea that they’ll gain some mystical guidance from their failures. I’m not sure how much math you’ve done regarding real life issues, but one of the hardest things about math in real life is that real life doesn’t tell you something is a math problem. Giving a person a problem they don’t recognize will not suddenly increase their mathematical capabilities.

That is the big problem I have here. Anet should not revel in the discontent of the unfortunate, falsely attributing the increase in average skill level to be from player’s personal gain.

phys.7689:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Manijin.3428:

Do you remember the first time you beat a video game, only to discover that you’d missed a whole bunch of side quests or bonus content? Did it cheapen the experience for you?

The problem is, the answer to this question is yes. And this is one of the biggest problem with casual vs. hardcore content.

First, I have to say this: difficult does not mean hardcore. What differentiates a casual gamer from a hardcore gamer is time investment. There are games out there that require literally days of grinding to get the necessary stats or items to even attempt content, and then it is really easy. There are games that are difficult, but you can just pick up and play quickly. The confusion comes from hardcore players having more practice, which leads to them generally being better at the game.

Now, with that misconception out of the way… there has always been a very big issue with gated content, whether it be skill based, gear based, or time based: inequality in rewards. Reward not just being shiny trinkets or new gear, but also story based or fun based rewards. Yes, that is right: the reward can be where you have fun with the game. I’ve seen it a lot in older MMOs, that require weeks of grinding and praying to the RNG gods before you can get to the part of the game that is supposed to be fun to play.

GW2 is trying to have it so there is content for everyone, but which content you like to play depending on skill level, time dedication, hardware specs, timezone, and personal preference ultimately leads to which rewards you have access to. By making one thing a “casual” part of the game, and another thing a “hardcore” part of the game, what Areanent is doing is just cutting off the casual players from some of the rewards of the game. The unfortunate part is that hardcore players often demand that casual players be cut off from their “special places”.

Now, this is not a unique problem. Thankfully, game designers figured out how to deal with this issue decades ago: It’s called a difficulty slider. It lets players have a customizable experience without detracting from the content or rewards of the game as a whole.

As for how GW2 could do this, it is quite simple: have two instances of all non-PVP areas of the game: a normal mode, and a hard mode. Normal mode would basically be the game we have now, with a few things made easier. Hard mode would be… harder, but would give some paltry higher reward, like 10% increase on gold or item rarity or something. Enough to entice players, but not enough to make it overpowered.

That way, the game can really be designed to appeal to both categories, but without withholding rewards from one group.

problem with your solution is, anet doesnt want to split the playerbase up. And they have some good reasons not to. But yeah, going from this forum (which is only 1 source of feedback) it may be possible that they will have to start doing this type of thing. Perhaps all they have to do is message harder content better, so that people know that if they dont consider them selves liking difficult, they may not like X content.

If they are making hardcore content, then they are already dividing up the playerbase.

Josh Foreman.8250:

The other question that I hope is answered in the positive is this: Can the average player skill be raised by challenging content like this? We know that X% of players don’t know about traits. We know Y% never swap out their 7-0 skills to accommodate specific challenges. And there are probably dozens of other systems that go unused by some portion of the player-base. If even 10% of that group hits a challenge like the Marionette and the subsequent tension causes them to look into these systems and they learn a new depth to the game they otherwise never would have, I think that’s a win for everybody. The average skill level rises, and in turn, we devs can make more interesting events that utilize the depth of the systems we have.

I’ve worked as an educator myself, and I can say that this simply doesn’t work. The situation described here is the exception, not the rule. It is unfortunate that I see this method teaching in college all the time, and had been subject to this method myself growing up. I don’t know if there is any direct term for this, but I’ve come to call it Educational Darwinism.

Educational Darwinism is the brilliant idea of not teaching people directly, but simply punishing them for not already knowing what you want them to know.

I hate this method, mostly because it doesn’t teach. Sure, the average grades or the average skill level will go up, but not because people are learning. It is because the people who don’t know get expelled/drop out/quit playing, and thus only the people who already know keep playing. I see it used in college and highschool, since there the growth or achievement of any individual student isn’t of concern.

If people not utilizing game mechanics is a problem, then requiring them to know game mechanics isn’t a solution. Think about it:

*The game isn’t new. If someone wanted to look up builds, traits, dodging, combo fields, etc. they would have already done it.
*There is no indication that they should learn something new. This leads to players just getting frustrated and quitting.
*There is no indication what they should learn. If they come to the conclusion that they are lacking knowledge with no one telling them somehow, they don’t know where to look. This leads to wrong ideas, frustration, and quitting.
*The whole thing feels like punishment, and so the more sensitive or defiant players will quit out of principle against an unfair system.

There are so many ways it can fail, and only one way it can succeed. Alienating the playerbase has more negative side effects than you’d think, especially in an event that requires hundreds of people.

Manijin.3428:

Do you remember the first time you beat a video game, only to discover that you’d missed a whole bunch of side quests or bonus content? Did it cheapen the experience for you?

The problem is, the answer to this question is yes. And this is one of the biggest problem with casual vs. hardcore content.

First, I have to say this: difficult does not mean hardcore. What differentiates a casual gamer from a hardcore gamer is time investment. There are games out there that require literally days of grinding to get the necessary stats or items to even attempt content, and then it is really easy. There are games that are difficult, but you can just pick up and play quickly. The confusion comes from hardcore players having more practice, which leads to them generally being better at the game.

Now, with that misconception out of the way… there has always been a very big issue with gated content, whether it be skill based, gear based, or time based: inequality in rewards. Reward not just being shiny trinkets or new gear, but also story based or fun based rewards. Yes, that is right: the reward can be where you have fun with the game. I’ve seen it a lot in older MMOs, that require weeks of grinding and praying to the RNG gods before you can get to the part of the game that is supposed to be fun to play.

GW2 is trying to have it so there is content for everyone, but which content you like to play depending on skill level, time dedication, hardware specs, timezone, and personal preference ultimately leads to which rewards you have access to. By making one thing a “casual” part of the game, and another thing a “hardcore” part of the game, what Areanent is doing is just cutting off the casual players from some of the rewards of the game. The unfortunate part is that hardcore players often demand that casual players be cut off from their “special places”.

Now, this is not a unique problem. Thankfully, game designers figured out how to deal with this issue decades ago: It’s called a difficulty slider. It lets players have a customizable experience without detracting from the content or rewards of the game as a whole.

As for how GW2 could do this, it is quite simple: have two instances of all non-PVP areas of the game: a normal mode, and a hard mode. Normal mode would basically be the game we have now, with a few things made easier. Hard mode would be… harder, but would give some paltry higher reward, like 10% increase on gold or item rarity or something. Enough to entice players, but not enough to make it overpowered.

That way, the game can really be designed to appeal to both categories, but without withholding rewards from one group.

BobbyStein.2315:

DarksunG.9537:

But telling us we can’t have any opinion on what we’ve played over the past year is totally unfair. I’m not sure it even makes logical sense.

When did I ever say you can’t have an opinion? I’m just asking that people reserve judgment on the next release until they’ve played it and absorbed the story components.

There is a saying in the entertainment industry, and this includes videogames: the most important part is the first 5 minutes.

What does that mean? You have to grab and hold the attention of the audience pretty quickly, otherwise you’ll lose that audience to something else. This is one of the biggest failures of the current LS content, and this is a notion that the Devs haven’t quite grasped. I’ll spell it out quite simply:

I don’t care what happens with Scarlet, and there’s nothing that can fix that now.

I’ve lost interest. The beginning of the story was too slow, too generic, too flat, and I don’t like any of the characters. I am not invested in the characters. Because I’m not invested, any creative twist or expansion of these characters has no meaning to me. I was not given a reason to care in the first place.

There are three big issues I’ve seen with engineers:

#1: It is painful to play. Literally. The amount of mashing I have to do on the keyboard has actually left my laptop’s keyboard broken, and also causes me severe wrist pain. I swapped to a SD build because it is lower maintenance.

#2: The engineer has a high skill floor, and because of this it isn’t immediately rewarding. The engineer is a hybrid in every sense, and as such they lack direction that people normally have when conceptualizing a class.

#3: Where the elementalist has skills that are powerful but hard to use well in PVE, the engineer has skills that are easy to use but weak in PVE. The elementalists utility is hard-baked into their weapons sets, whereas engineers have no weapon variety, instead relying on utilities for variety. This intensifies into a perfect storm of difficulty and an inability to impress.

I think that #3 isn’t talked about a lot, but it is important. I ran HGH grenades for so long, mostly because there wasn’t anything else to run.

Elixirs: They are good for self buffing and spots of mild support for teammates, but are invisible. Often times, if an engi is running an elixir build, you’ll never be able to tell. They also require heavy trait dedication to be effective.

Gadgets: These strange tools are tailored for specific uses you’ll rarely ever see, and don’t have the traits to become really useful. Nearly everything that a gadget does, some other utility or kit does better. That, or what the gadget does is so obtuse that there’s no point.

Turrets: This is what originally drew me to the class. They were decent once, but bug after “tooltip update”/nerf after bug has left turrets as a big mess that no one can use. They die instantly and just plain don’t work, leaving most turrets as a filler for blast finishers. Dedicated traits do nothing to ease this pain.

The end result? You go with kits. You have plenty of kits, and they each do something useful and unique that you can use.

This is a grave oversight on Anets part. The entirety of the variety and power of the engineer is located in their utility slots. Competition in utility slots is fierce, and every single utility must be compared to a kit and everything that kit offers. This is where so many skills fall apart.

For example, take Elixir S. Invulnerability period, self daze, provides stealth on toss, stun break. Seems alright? Compare that to Tool Kit: invulnerability period on a 1/3rd the cooldown that is not a self daze, 1200 range pull + interrupt, high damage + confusion inflicting skill, short duration bleed/cripple patch, stun break with kit refinement, turret repair with mild vulnerability, triggers sigils.

It is obvious that Tool Kit wins out, every time, almost regardless of what traits you pick. The same can be said of… well… pretty much every utility that isn’t a kit. Why take flame turret when the bomb kit does the same stuff, and more? Why take elixir C when you can just use the elixir gun to do so much more? Why take the rocket turret for burst AoE damage when the flamethrower can do that, but so much better? Why take the personal battering ram… at all? Why go with HGH when fire fields and Juggernaut give just as much might?

There are some that stand out as a unique or useful option, and you’ll see these get used alongside of kits to fill in holes that were there before. But, not enough utilities do this. You’ll almost always end up going with x3 kits, or x2 kits + additional utility because most of the utilities aren’t worth the space they occupy.

What Anet needs to do is buff a lot of the utilities so that they can compete with kits. Anet has to remember that engineers don’t have potent weapon options, or even weapon diversity. We are a class that is all about the utilities, and most utilities suck.

Serdoc.7261:

I think the buff to immobilize makes sense in PvE, but it is out of place and creates frustrating /cheesy situations in both WvW and PvP.

Please reduce immobilize max stacks to 1 for WvW and PvP, leave it at 3 for PvE.

My sentiments exactly.

Back when I played a turret control engi in sPVP, I could keep enemies locked down for long periods of time with just 1 stack. This had a big risk to it: I had to stagger my slowly flying immobilizes at the right time. If it was too soon, my immobilizes were ineffective and just wasted time. If it was too late, my enemies could avoid the next immobilize, and then I was at risk again.

This required calculated tactics and timing. I didn’t know if my opponents had condi reducing skills, or if they had ample cleanse. I had to guess and take note for the future. If I can just stack immobilize, then there’s no choice to make anymore.

Bombsaway.7198:

I am torn. How many of you posters play a melee damage class?
One of the key problems of the game has been that ranged damage can’t whittle anyone down very much before they are in “smashface” mode.
The immobilize buff helped.
But it would be pretty boring to just sit.
On the other hand, it is pretty frustrating to be ranged damage with melee in your face in seconds.

If it is toned down, there needs to be something done to make melee’s ability to close range far less effective.

Ranged damage already has a ton of ways to keep meleers at range:

swiftness
chill
cripple
knockbacks
escape/movement skills

or simply staggering immobilize skills instead of spamming them.

I believe the problem with elementalists and their sustain is that, with the high skill ceiling of elementalists, the top tier players are able to string together all of their boons and heals really efficiently. Elementalists end up being balanced around that skill level, and the casual elementalist gets shafted because of it.

The obvious solution to that problem is, unfortunately, not a very satisfying one. Basically it involves reducing the skill ceiling by locking attunements and buffing their individual actions in them. This, of course, kills the diversity of the elementalist, so it is less than ideal.

Anyway, one of the reasons why Elementalists have low HP is because of how well they could originally do everything. Eles have a lot of AoE damage and boon support, and also they had a lot of versatility and mobility. In sPVP this doesn’t show up much, but in group battles in WvW the elementalist is a frightening force to be reckoned with. I’ve seen entire zergs slaughtered in static fields and meteor showers at choke points.

Two flaws with this. First, as I mentioned above, all of their mobility and sustain is nerfed due to how effective they can potentially be. Second, all of their AoE skills (and many of their attacks for that matter) have long delays with extremely visible cues, meaning that actually hitting with any of these high damaging skills is nigh impossible. It is this large delay that made me reroll the ele when I first started playing the game. Sure, I get a bunch of big damage and flashy effects, but what good are they when opponents can just casually walk out of the way?

I don’t know about making any changes to HP tiers. Guardians and thieves are intimidating enough with just 10k base HP. If anything, I’d rather just buff Eles to be more frightening than increase their HP but leave them kitten in the end. The HP tiers themselves are set around the downed state, and it is important to note that GW2 is assumed to be a team based game. Because of this, high damage bursts from enemies are assumed to be easily mitigated by having teammates rez you from the down state.

Personally, I’ve been wanting to see the following:

Power (primary)
Condition damage (secondary)
Vitality (secondary)

That way you can have condi damage without going into full conditions.

^You really can.

spoj.9672:

Its highly beneficial for DS flash builds. Think about other builds other than just your own when judging traits…

If the on entrance/on exit traits were balanced outside of NtD, then flashing builds would stay the same, and other builds would be buffed instead.

Andele.1306:

Anchoku.8142:

I would rather they add NtD to Last Gasp in the minor master for Soul Reaping and make it an inherent CD reduction for putting 15 points into the trait line. The balance team keeps emphasizing how they want Necromancers in DS as much as possible but the CD is a real barrier.

Or plain reward proper DS play by removing the 10s CD from exit and just leave the on enter one, thus if you were for 9s in DS pop out for life force, you get to DS again right away.

I like this idea, too. The cooldown only starting after exiting the transformation feels weird. If anything, DS should be inherently balanced by LF generation: you don’t get LF in DS, so you have to pop out of DS in order to generate more.

Of course, this would require the devs to look at the drastic differences between builds and how LF is generated. But, since that requires more work, they’ll just stick with the cooldown and call it a day. Or, even worse, they’ll throw a hard cap on LF generation, and then you might as well just have a cooldown.

It is kind of funny with the way condi builds go: to generate life force, they need to take soul marks, and soul marks competes with NtD.

I have been summoned here!

As for hybrid models: there is no such thing. A game is either balanced, or it is not balanced. Perfect imbalance is more or less something that happens when a game isn’t balanced, but isn’t fully broken. The hardest part about making a game that doesn’t rely on perfect balance is that it can very easily delve into the broken state. Let me explain how this works:

There is a saying, I don’t know exactly how it goes, but it amounts to this: The protagonist is only as magnificent as his antagonist. Basically, the value of any tactic, item, or character is the sum of what it counters more than what it does. As per the videos example: champion A is valuable because it beats most things, but champion B is valuable because it beats champion A. The more things that champion A beats, the more valuable champion B becomes.

Something is broken when either Champion A doesn’t have any practical counters, or champion B has so many drawbacks that it can’t be compensated for by the fact that it can beat Champion A.

While this is interesting in game design, this is not always a good thing. There are two terms that arise when a game is in the “perfect imbalance” state, and neither of them are really good:

#1: Dominating. This is the overt prevalence of a particular tactic. The problem with a game that is being dominated by one class, one tactic, or one item is that this comes at the detriment of everyone else. For people like to who play Champ A it is fun, and for people who like to play Champ B it is fun, but Champ C, Champ D, Champ E… it is a miserable experience. It is important to consider the shifting meta of a perfectly imbalanced game as a point of widespread exclusion for players with preferences.

#2: Hard Counter. AKA build wars. Ultimately, in any multiplayer game the players want to have a certain level of agency in determining the outcome of a match. A player playing Champion A still wants to be able to beat Champion B, even while at a disadvantage, should they make the right choices or if the other player makes the wrong choices. This agency can only exist in a “perfect imbalance” state if it isn’t that imbalanced at all.

But failure to adequately adjust these mechanics leads to forcing balance by instituting a hard counter. The problem with a hard counter is that this takes control away from the actions of the player, and instead makes combat into an elaborate guessing game where you hope your opponent doesn’t have the thing that will always beat you.

Failure in adequate balancing is actually the subject of my formerly highest rated post. There was a thread awhile ago called Constructive Necromancer Thoughts, which was essentially Phantaram calling for necro nerfs and subsequently getting them, but in this thread I laid out exactly what the problems with necros were. The short version is this:

“The biggest problem with necros, and condition necros in general, is that both their offense and their defense is ultimately not in their own hands. "

Hard counters and blatant dominance are not fun things to have in a game. A player needs to have their victories and defeats be meaningful, and be readily understood as something in their control. The more balanced things are, the more in control the player becomes to the outcome of the game.

Something else I think is being neglected is the field of play. All of this I wrote above, along with I assume what other people are writing, is all from the perspective of a vacuous sPVP circumstance when comparing one class to only one other class. But, that isn’t the case for most circumstances. I see so many threads pop up talking about balance, but they almost never specify what they are talking about:

Solo PVE
Group PVE
1 vs. 1 WvW
1 vs. X WvW
X vs. X WvW
1 vs. 1 sPVP duel
1 vs. 1 sPVP conquest
1 vs. X sPVP conquest
X vs. X sPVP conquest
Which conquest map

This leads to a lot of muddying between goals.

Would I say that GW2 is perfectly imbalanced? Off hand, no. I can’t be much of an authority on sPVP, since I’ve mainly PVEed for awhile now. However, following the complaints of the standard poster hasn’t changed much over the past 7 months:

Condi spam
Petting Zoo
CC spam

has been going since the beginning of July. The mark of a perfect imbalance would be shifting trends, but trends aren’t shifting.

ArchonWing.9480:

I wonder if anyone brought up condition damage.

All this talk about zerker dominance but one of the reasons why it’s so dominant is that the alternatives for defeating enemies are so bad.

If pve conditions were a viable alternative, then at least it wouldn’t just be zerker. If you want build diversity…

And personally, I like the fact that utilities, defense, control, and healing can be viable without having to wear crappy gear for it.

Conditions are mentioned here and there. In my solution post I mention a bit about conditions, and there are a few posts talking about conditions in the thread. Good luck finding them, though.

In short, the second big issue with conditions is that their strengths are also absent from PVE. The ability to cripple a mob’s movement, as well as the ability to bypass toughness/protection, as well as the ability to maintain engagement and prevent auto healing, as well as the wider AoE coverage are all meaningless in PVE:

A)Enemies are made bulky seemingly by HP alone. I can’t find a high toughness mob that stacks protection.

B)There’s no reason to cripple or chill anything. Enemies don’t act slower when chilled.

C) Mobs don’t run away to reset. Though this would be kind of stupid to put in the game, so there’s no problem to fix here.

D) Mobs all run right up to you and gather on one spot, ready to be mowed down by PBAoE attacks and melee cleave. Having wider AoE means nothing against enemies that do this, and pretty much all enemies do this.

Of course, the biggest issue is the condition cap. The condi cap makes it so any more than one dedicated condi user becomes ineffective and redundant, so a new system needs to be put in place to have conditions be effective. Otherwise, any other changes are just forcing players to deal with a bad system instead of making the bad system a good system.

Splitting the post here, since this isn’t relevant to the above.

I am disappointed with Anets reasoning on the critical damage nerf (which will hurt valkyrie and celestial as well as zerkers). I can understand normalizing the stats, but the justification for implementing the damage nerf just reeks of “I don’t want to change my mind”.

They say in the livestream that there are a bunch of things that need to happen with PVE to address zerker dominance, but then follow up by saying that it is going to be hard and take awhile to do, so now they’ll nerf crit damage overall and institute the other changes later.

This made think “…What?!”. Make a bad decision now, and then do the good one later? Why not just make the good one later? The zerker issue isn’t some end-of-the-world problem we are dealing with at the moment. It doesn’t need to invoke some stopgap measure at the detriment to so much of the game in order to be fixed immediately.

Normally childishness in antics doesn’t bother me that much, as I’m quite the silly one myself, but when it came to the explanation for this decision, the combination of the two was just painful to watch, and painful to think about.

Ragnarawk.8697:

@Blood Red Arachnid:

There is nothing wrong with DPS being king. Doing damage is a highly popular role. But from an RPG perspective, there is a missing element to mitigate damage that should be present: resource management. Management of resources is a staple of RPGs that GW2 seemingly ignores. While players do have to manage their dodges to an extent, it is obviously not working as a mitigating factor. This is probably due to the high uptime of both dodges and full damage when correctly dodging. It’s probably not helping that it’s the sole relevant resource to manage, and common to all professions. Cool downs on skills don’t work either, especially with the effectiveness of auto-attack.

Without limiting all out damage with resource management, the game ends up being solely focused on mitigating damage through dps. Armor really isn’t about surviving longer, as it is about making whatever resource that keeps the character alive more effective, and last longer. Since active defense is common to all professions, and is the primary source of survival, armor becomes meaningless, and actually detrimental to group compositions.

I don’t know what the answer is on this one, and you may already be well aware of this missing game design element. If I could give any suggestion, it would be to look towards other “DPS is king” games, and try to integrate what works there into GW2. DDO comes to mind, actually. While it had it’s glaring flaws, it did succeed in having good class interaction and build diversity. All of that interaction and build diversity was completely dependant on a strict resource management scheme. Otherwise it would have been optimal for everyone to run a Warforged great-axe barbarian, with one Warforged sorcerer for buffing DPS.

With all sincerity I say “good luck!”.

The thing with a single gear set being more effective than the rest is that it discriminates against player preferences and future game design in the long run. The ideal system would be to reward diversity of gear in some way or another. Currently, the advantages of choosing more defensive stats are nonexistent because the PVE environment doesn’t have all the factors that enforce them.

But alas, you do have a good point. In any game that doesn’t force completely dedicated roles, the goal is to do as much damage as possible while still performing that role in a satisfactory capacity. This is why I continually say that the problem isn’t about player roles, or the lack of a trinity system, but instead properly enforcing and rewarding preferences in the same build.

But the resource thing is an interesting point. Coming from a game that had an additional resource (City of Heroes had endurance) to cooldowns, I have to disagree with that assessment that resource management limits the prevalence of DPS. What additional resources do is force players to build around the management of that resource, and not off of different ideologies or preferences.

Thus, adding an additional resource to manage in GW2 would change the freeform DPS meta into a DPS meta that is based on competently managing a resource while still doing as much as possible. The only time that the resource is limiting is if one builds themselves into incompetence, and we already see that in GW2. You may notice how many of the peak DPS or high DPS builds (for example, Obal’s build I linked in the second post) are still loaded with a ton of support utilities and traits. This is because those supports are necessary to sustain oneself. It is very possible to go into, say, a full signet or full spirit weapon build that doesn’t have any of the active mitigation in traits, and that build will frequently faceplant at enemies.

Though it might make more sense if I could recognize the games you were citing. Hell, for all I know, an additional resource would add something else to the game if it was something other than a cost for abilities.

I’m looking forward to the change myself.

Though I initially hated the change to Flanking Strike + Larcenous Strike, that was more on execution than anything else. I had a hard time actually using the skill, but as time went on… I didn’t actually get better. But nonetheless, I consider that a “me” problem more than something Anet should fix. FS/LS was boss back when they made the change, and the only reason it has fallen out of use is because the boon stealing aspect was cut in half. It is still a decent skill otherwise.

I’m looking forward to the pistol whip change myself, due to one fact: the evade portion of Pistol Whip is on the second half of the combo.

The hardest part about using pistol whip in PVE has always been that the evade was nigh impossible to time. Enemies would get stunned then retaliate precisely when you weren’t evading, and the awkward pacing of the attack meant that it was extremely hard to use against enemies with defiant.

Splitting the stun portion and the damage portion would, in effect, split the stun portion and the evade portion. Since the evade is on the second half of the chain, this means that I can continually spam the stun portion inbetween enemy attacks, and then use the frenzy at the right time, allowing me to dodge their moves. The overall timing would still be difficult due to the length of the attack as a whole, but it would actually be possible now.

I would find this preferable to FS/LS, since with Larcenous Strike you are locked out of the evade, but with pistol whip you would be locked into the evade until it was used. Though it won’t be as spammable, so maybe S/D will still find a place for me in PVE.

I’ve been thinking about this trait a lot, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I really hate Near to Death. I’m wondering if anyone else feels this way, and if so then I/someone else will make a thread about it in the balance forum.

For the unaffiliated, Near to Death reduces the recharge on Death Shroud to 7 seconds, or by 30%. Now, by itself, I wonder what purpose would this serve. In theory, reducing the recharge on DS would be effective if you had so much LF generation that you could hit maximum charge 3 seconds before DS recharges. Then, you could enter into DS earlier, lose that additional LF, and you wouldn’t end up wasting any of the additional LF generation that would’ve occurred while you were sitting at the cap.

The problem is, I have never encountered this in game. I can’t pick out a single moment where I had so much LF generation that having a 3 second lower cooldown on DS actually meant something, or contributed meaningfully to any engagement. What usually happens is this: I don’t have a full bar of LF, entering DS earlier just means I lose more LF earlier. None of the skills have a 7 second cooldown on use, so entering DS earlier just means I have to spend more time building up LF for when the skills are actually off cooldown.

Back when DS actually absorbed the final hit fully, this trait was awesome. Then, it was like a 7 second one-time block. But with damage spillover, this trait has lost any individual use.

So, what does that leave Near to Death doing now? Well, currently there are several traits that are based on entering DS: Deathly Invigoration, Furious Demise, Weakening Shroud, Shrouded Removal, Foot in the Grave, and Spiteful Spirit. Having Near to Death makes these traits more powerful, because they allow you to enter into DS more often, having a higher uptime and more potent effects.

There is a big problem with this: all of these traits are balanced/being balanced around the idea that you are using Near to Death. This makes these 6 potent traits get nerfed into nigh uselessness under the assumption that you will be spamming DS alongside of other idealistic conditions.

In effect, Near to Death exists solely to make other traits useless unless you take Near to Death. This makes Near to Death one of the worst traits to ever exist, since it works solely as a hard coded nerf to Necromancers.

If Near to Death didn’t exist, then traits wouldn’t be balanced around Near to Death, and the end result would be that traits based on entering/leaving DS would be more useful for every build.

I do think our retaliation needs to be more accessible. Right now, nearly all our retal is loaded on axe #3:. Unholy feast is actually a really good source of retaliation if you can hit multiple targets, giving near full duration by itself. The problems being that axe sucks, and it requires you to be surrounded to use effectively. So, for the majority of circumstances, it isn’t enough.

But, since our retaliation is currently balanced around another trait that exists almost solely to make other traits worthless, there’s no true way to improve retal without fixing those other issues. I would like to see the following changes, though:

Spiteful Spirit: 5 second duration
Spiteful Vigor: 10 second duration
Unholy Feast: fine where it is

IMO I think necromancers need to get more regular torment. Personally I think tainted shackles is fine, since it makes up for the low single target damage by being a very large AoE, but there should be some other skill that gives torment alongside of it. Currently, torment is more of a gimmick than anything else.

Though this update doesn’t affect my builds (I run carrion and LP quite often with it), I can see how this is an overall nerf to the burning duration.

By virtue of being in DS, on top of the 10 second recharge that comes built into the trait, there are additional recharge limits placed on the skill:

The longer you stay in DS, the longer it takes for the Dhuumfire to proc again. DS only enters into a cooldown once you leave it, so the actual recharge is going to be based on how long it takes you to drop from DS after a lifeblast + DS’s recharge time from there.

Second, once the cooldown is done, you still have to go through the whole chain of entering DS → CC the enemy → use life blast, which takes longer than one would expect. So overall, I’d say the true cooldown for dhuumfire is around 14 to 15 seconds. So much for reverting its duration.

Of course, the thing about engineers is that they lack the WTF BURST OMG that other classes have. In my turret control builds, I’ve chained supply crate to lock down opponents before, and the end result of that lockdown was to safely use blowtorch and wait 10 seconds for the burn to take full effect.

If we had a killshot or backstab or eviscerate or mindrack or pistolwhip or 100 blades or something along those lines, this would be an extremely lethal control. But we don’t… also the whole control chain is reliant on opponents neither breaking stun nor cleansing the immobilize, which gives it two points of failure as compared to the standard single failure point that most CC has.

Engineers already have a lot of end recovery from adrenal pump, adrenal implant, vigor, and elixir R. I’m not sure engineers will be going just for energy, unless they’re running a low end recovery build. They might benefit more from chill or bleeding instead.

Personally… I have no idea what I’m going to do with my rifle. Mostly because I haven’t cemented out a build to use the rifle with. But, in all likelyhood, I’ll either go with strength, so I can generate more might outside of HGH.

Times like this I’m glad I run hybrids…

Anyway, the thing with power builds in WvW is that it depends on both the philosophy and the circumstances. For zergs, many people way to run with PVT gear as to avoid being killed or downed by stray enemy fire. This is a defensive philosophy, and it often overlooks the flaws that come with it: in PVT, your stray fire does less damage and is less likely to down someone. A defeated player works as a rez for your own team, so the quicker you can defeat a player, the more quickly you can rez your own team, and the more overall health that gives the zerg.

I personally follow the offensive philosophy: If you get immobilized and run over by a melee train, or if you get focus fired by a small group, you are going to die really quickly no matter what gear you are wearing. By contrast, by having high damage you have a high deterrence rate for being attacked, and make a larger immediate impact on the field. You become less influenced by retaliation and confusion, since you perform more efficient attacks. Hopefully, you’ll be engaging enemies in a position of power (in the train, on the wall, at superior range, etc), where defense is handled by superior positioning and tactics instead of passives.

The problem being that, since I am much squishier, should I find myself in a compromising position, I’m more likely to go down due to ambient damage. Unfortunately it is a tradeoff that works best when assuming Fabian tactics, and always trying to engage at a point of power.

When I read about critical damage changes, it felt like I had swallowed a stone. I’m trying to be a doomsayer, as there is no sense in getting upset over something that hasn’t happened yet…

This thread has more than doubled in size, and there are so many thoughtlines flying around that I’m not sure exactly who to respond. However, I will try to touch on a few things:

#1: Dodge and the Heal Skill are not the only forms of active defense. They are the only universal forms of active defense. Classes still have blinds, stuns, vigor, blocks, evades, invulnerability, reflects, supplementary heals, etc. Because of this, balancing around only the dodge and heal skill will result in classes with less defenses in utilities being hit harder.

This is actually a really sticky wicket, because currently active defenses do their job, and they do it very well. You are supposed to reflect a stream of bullets, you are supposed to blind a mob of wolves, you’re supposed to block on the big windup, and you’re supposed to heal after you realize you blocked too early. The problem is that, currently, enemy design is too basic, and so active defenses are capable of handling pretty much everything.

Thankfully, anet has been designing around that for awhile now. New enemy groups and new areas already have many of the suggestions I’ve made put into place.

#2: The problem is not the lack of a mandatory role system. Classes already have roles they fulfill in groups. These roles, however, are nuanced, and multiple can be fulfilled by just one class. The ability to have such diversity in utility for a single class is a strength of GW2: the flexibility opens itself up to diversity, which opens itself up to personalized play style, which makes the game more appealing to potential players.

#3: I must again say that this is not about skilled players or punishing them. The fact the better you are at the game, the better you can function in GC gear is not something I intend to change. The idea I have to fix this zerker dominance will make the game harder for everyone, but in a way that affects glass cannons more than anyone else. End result: using GC gear will still require skill. Even more so, now that the aspects that equalize gear in PVP scenarios will actually exist in PVE. The ability to kill things so fast they don’t do a lot of damage will still be a viable tactic, however balanced upon the idea that damage will be more consistent, and killing enemies will be harder.

This is, unfortunately, the greatest weakness of my suggestion. Making the game harder and more complicated (AKA harder in a different way) is not always the best direction to take the game. Hard to implement and risky outcomes… it is no wonder why Anet is going with a wide sweeping change instead.

Anyway, the thing with skill vs. less skill in gear is not an intended feature, particularly because it is a blanket statement that applies to any game, different gear specs or not. If all of the classes just had predetermined stats and no true gear choice, more skilled players would still be rewarded more than less skilled players. It is quite obvious that different gear is meant to give different advantages and disadvantages to builds, and not to serve as a psuedo-gold sink as players escalate through an arbitrary scale of gear tiers.

#4: This is not about any particular class. Every class sans Necro has loads of active defenses in their utilities, and even Necros have plenty of debuffs alongside of their Lifeforce regeneration mechanic (which acts a bit like a convoluted heal for defensive purposes). As for the subject of class balance… that is what the rest of the forum is for.

heh… gear tiers. That’s fun to say.

I am really hoping Anet doesn’t make the wrong choice with crit damage changes. I can’t think of anything off-hand that would retain statistical balance of different gear on the same set.

Well guys… I tried. I really did.

I think you guys are neglecting the cumulative effect of heals and boons, as well as basic cooperation and that there is more active defense than just dodging.

Though I classify a lot of heals and boons as active defense, a big difference with heals is that they are finite in the damage that they mitigate. This limited effectiveness is aided by 3 additional factors:

Higher health (healing capacitance)
Higher toughness + protection/weakness (heal efficiency)
Additional heals from party members

The third is the most important one. Without the additional healing of extra party members, the limited damage removal from heals isn’t sufficient. It is for this reason that, in dungeon pug runs and group events, Soldiers and Clerics go down all the time, even when paired with each other. When the players split and range at a distance, they cut each other off from their heals, and this causes them to go down. Or, if they don’t properly time their heals or boon application, damage received overwhelms them and they die. When paired with non-healing members, they also suffer from this issue.

So, while the ability to facetank damage and heal it away only works when done collectively, the mitigation from non-healing active defenses works individually and regardless of group composition. This makes the former a special circumstance, and the latter the norm.

Abramelin.7356:

While I agree with your op bra I don’t think ignoring the concerns of Nike and co is the way to go. It’s pretty divisive to just say “these guys are hostile and unreasonable, ignore them”. I don’t agree with many of their comments so far but they are not trolls and I’d like to understand where they are coming from better.

It seems like this zerker debate has become so poisoned over time that some people reflexively see any attempt to change the meta as either an attack on them personally (along the lines of the “stacking is exploiting” fallacy) or a dumbing down of the game for “bads”.

The thing is that, when the discussion becomes about the person more than the idea, it is then that the discussion ends. The formal term for it is Genetic Fallacy.

As for the source of this conflict, this comes down to a rather old debate: elitism. The whole concept is actually really old, since in its foundations it is about entitlements: Who deserves something, why they deserve it, why others don’t deserve it, etc. This is important, since given the scarcity of any commodity, there will be people fighting over that commodity and its uses.

For a particular example, the “1337” and the “bads” are vying for developmental time and money from Anet. The devs have limited work time and funds to get things done, and being a successful business is about giving people what they want. The people, of course, are divided and want different things. The “1337” want things that are harder, want things to be balanced around specific skill use as well as optimum builds and conditions. The “bads” want things to be balanced around casual encounters and ease of play, preferring not to be challenged. These two concepts are opposites, and so the two groups war with each other. Every suggestion or attempt to change the game that favors one group can be seen as an attack on the developmental time by another group.

This is one of the reasons why zerkers being objectively best everywhere is bad for the game. Anet has 3 choices when making new game content: balance it for elitists, balance it for casuals, or try to compromise. When it is balanced for elitists, we see nerfs to rewards, and harder content that players can’t get through. When balanced for casuals, we see unsatisfying content and no reward for building for optimization. When we see compromise, we see a mixture of boring and rewardless that satisfies no one.

If things were more balanced around the performance of gear sets, we can see content that is challenging and rewarding on average, instead of boring and rewardless.

Berner.7289:

A well-reasoned analysis, but I disagree that player skill has no part of this discussion. Objectively, the “zerker” playstyle has a higher skillcap because the active defenses must be deployed correctly (type, timing, placement) to gain the benefits of front-loaded DPS. Failure to correctly use the active defense in a highly skillful manner typically results in the defeat of the player and/or team (and corresponding loss of money and time).

By contrast, more defensive playstyles have a lower skill requirement because there is greater room for error in the execution of the available active defenses. This is not an elitist statement, or an insult to lower skilled players. It is an objective fact, and frankly a positive testament to the game’s design that all content can be completed by players of varying skill levels.

But it is a basic tenant of game design that higher skill should be rewarded. Lowering the skillcap — or raising the skill floor — eliminates the fun of getting better at the game.

This is why I disagree with your premise that there is a problem with the Berserker meta. Nerfing Berserker gear or raising the effectiveness of defensive playstyles lowers the skillcap, making the game less rewarding for skillful play. Currently there is positive correlation between higher skilled play and player reward (measured in any number of metrics, including gold/hr and time to complete content). To reduce or eliminate that correlation by lowering the skillcap would be a significant mistake, in my opinion.

The problem with player skill is that it can’t be quantified, and is in the eye of the judge. What is “good”? Does someone who knows to press dodge when they see the windup “good” or just more informed? More experienced? Did they research the boss and read what someone else said to do? Did they come up with it on their own? How often do they need to dodge to be considered “good”? Likewise, what constitutes “skillful” use versus “obvious” use? I can lay down a wall of reflection in front of a golem before it spits lasers at me. Is that good?

I honestly don’t know. I wrote this analysis predicating one condition with active defenses: players use active defenses. It is a really simple requirement, and if you don’t go with this requirement you enter into another conundrum: For any leeway that a more durable set gives, this can be accommodated for by assuming more incompetence on the player’s part. If soldier’s lets you take twice as much damage, it is no good if they fail to dodge twice as often. If clerics gear gives you more heals, it is useless if they fail to use their heals when appropriate.

The end result is nothing gets done. Every assumption of “skill” can be counterbalanced by an equal assumption of “lack of skill”. So, I went with the math on the issue, and mathematically berserkers is the same as soldiers as far as combat effectiveness goes, not factoring active defenses.

If you are talking about my solution to the problem in the other thread, this also comes predicated off of the idea that everyone has active defenses. Sustained damage by PVE enemies hits everyone, and someone in more durable gear that doesn’t use active defenses will find themselves in more trouble. The sustained damage will accumulate along with the burst damage, and without avoiding it, reducing it, or healing it away, the more durable set will find themselves kissing pavement.

Higher skill will still be rewarded.

Nike Porphyrogenita.8137:

Still waiting to hear what the “problem” is. In a good player’s hands, pve dps builds are objectively superior.

SO WHAT? Please explain why and how this is a “problem” that requires “fixing.”

This is a fine example of the wrong line of thinking I was talking about. You can see here that the subject isn’t about the gear, but about “good players”. The zerker issue exists outside of player skill, but the inability to look past player skill has left Nike blinded.

This failure in logic follows through nearly every thread on the zerker issue, this one included. A nice shorthand for recognizing this error is to look at a few key phrases:

“What they want”
“They use this as”
“Good player”
“What you are doing”
“What they say”

and such. This is ultimately an act of hostility and not reasoning. As such it accomplishes nothing.

It is my advice to not respond to these kinds of comments. Yes, I realize the irony of this post, but I do need an example.

runeblade.7514:

Would this solution destroy stacking? I don’t care if berserker meta gets buffed or nerfed. The OP does not address stacking as an issue or if the side-effects of berserker meta does anything to stacking.

Stacking is, in itself, a different issue that isn’t dependent on berserker gear. It’s not even a subject of this thread, really.

Malevil.2104:

Another essay about how is berserker gear bad for game but still not a single valid argument how passive stats combination and defenses would make game more challeging compared to active defenses which berserker setup uses.

…skill and challenge? That isn’t really the subject here. The subject is equality in performance through calculated exchange of durability for damage.

I feel I have to restate this: my goal isn’t to make zerker obsolete. My goal is to make zerker have drawbacks to it use, and make the exchange of durability for damage have a meaningful impact.

Good to know this thread asploded while I was asleep.

theundivine.4318:

While I think your (the OP) analysis is good, it ignores the biggest advantage a soldier’s geared character has over a glass cannon: it survives a lot better in a multiple-enemy environment. There’s a good reason people go high defence in World vs. World. Soldiers can wade deep into a zerg that’s dealing lots of AoEs and come out the other end intact.

There are two sides to this. While soldiers is more capable of taking damage, the enemies that are being fought last longer still, so they end up doing more damage overall. With zerker gear, although you take more damage, you kill enemies much faster, which means that you’ll be suffering less damage overall.

A multi-enemy scenario does invoke some of what I am trying to accomplish. In that circumstance, while zerker gear isn’t useless or ineffective, it does have more risks associated with its use. This makes it so more durable sets can perform on more equal footing that zerker gear.

The goal of my suggestion isn’t to make zerker gear ineffective or useless. That just changes one dominance issue into another one. My goal is to make zerker higher risk, so that having different specs and multiple specs has tangible benefits over running just zerker.

Faux.1937:

You forgot some important Issues

A fast list of things he forgot and they DO matter alot, Im not going to discus them or go into big detail, just list some things OP missed.

1) Condition builds in group play and against Objects
2) CC/support against bosses (there almost isnt any)
3) Some parts of the Game (high level fractals, some dungeon paths etc..) things hit so hard so fast, its BETTER to be full DPS than tank.
4) Heals and Conditions cant Crit and also they have no stat synergy to make them more desirable like Zerk does (The combo of Power/Prec/Crit damage all helps each other and multiplies), Toughness and Heal power do have some synergy, but no multipliers.
5) Longer fights doesnt make them more fun.

I didn’t forget them. Most of this is included in the solution post in another thread, if not listed here. Many things I didn’t list here are because they aren’t pertinent.

When you go into conditions, this is adding another dimension to combat other than damage and durability. Conditions inflict a different kind of damage that follows different rules, so they behave differently. Regarding their damage output and their durability, it follows the a similar exchange. However, to give conditions full depth, you have to delve into enemy toughness, enemy cleanses, enemy boons, the effectiveness of debuffs, etc. As for the condition cap, that is another issue with software design, and everyone (including anet) knows that conditions can’t be balanced with the cap as it is currently.

The thing with CC and support is that they function outside of gear specifics. A zerker can stack might just as well as a rapid set, and their stuns work just the same.

While not related, heals and conditions do have stat synergy. Healing becomes more efficient with higher toughness, and they have higher capacitance with vitality. Toughness and vitality also react together, making each additional hitpoint more difficult to take away. Though the multipliers aren’t readily seen, they do exist.

I agree that longer fights aren’t more fun. In my suggestion thread, I proposed reducing enemy HP and giving them a heal on a long cooldown, which will make stuns more useful as well as giving poison a role in PVE.

I use S/D in PVE for two reasons:

#1: Boon stealing. The ability to remove boons being spammable is pretty helpful in a number of situations.

#2: The evade on flanking strike. While D/D has higher single target damage, Death Blossom has an evasion window of 1/4th of a second. Flanking strike is double that, which gives me a much larger margin for error.

I only use S/D against bosses. Everywhere else I just uses S/P.

As for the vigor traits… I am always in conflict on what build to go with: 25/30/0/0/15, or 25/25/0/0/20, just to get bountiful theft. The AoE boon steal and AoE vigor are really helpful, but with how much it is nerfed I’m not sure if I should lose executioner for it.

Vargamonth.2047:

If you are receiving a constant stream of small healings from both your signet of malice and ally regenration/heals, having more or less vitality doesn’t change anything.
If the damage you are receiving is higher than the healing, your HP will go down at the same exact speed. You just will be able to survive for longer in this situation, while dealing less damage because of your investment in vitality.
If you stop receiving damage for any reason, the amount of healing / time needed to top you is still the same.

For vitality to be really useful in the situation you describe, you would need to receive at some point a high enough “spike” of damage to deplete your “natural” health pool.
It’s just impossible to heal you for more than the damage you take.
If you never go under the bonus HP mark, then the fight would have been completely viable, and faster, without that vitality.

Toughness adds sustain because it reduces the amount of damage you take (so less healing / time is required to top you again). So do Healing Power because it makes those heals stronger.
Vitality just protects you against damage bursts that could have killed you otherwise.

The whole point is that I am not receiving constant damage from the enemy. No one is. The amount of damage taken changes depending on circumstances. Having more health leads to less downs, and additional healing increases the margin for error beyond just healing to max at at lower health.

I also suspect you underestimate how powerful the signet of malice can be a times. However I digress: teammates also provide heals, which adds on to healing capacitance outside of what the class normally has. Under low HP circumstances, that additional healing accomplishes nothing and doesn’t contribute to your survival. However, with high HP, upon taking more damage instead of downing you survive, and that additional healing works to counterbalance the damage received, making you capable of objectively taking more hits.

Of course, healing capacitance doesn’t mean anything if you and your team have low healing capabilities. Healing capacitance works on the principle that, throughout a certain timeframe, there is additional healing potential that is wasted due to being at capped health As you said, if you are healing less than the damage you are taking, and then this won’t work.

I find myself with additional health and healing potential the majority of the time, though.